News from Neptune"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." --Noam Chomsky2015-07-14T23:29:10Zhttp://newsfromneptune.com/feed/atom/WordPressadminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=3152015-07-14T23:29:10Z2015-07-14T23:28:44ZCHAMPAIGN-URBANA, ILLINOIS
JULY 13, 2015

PART 1 – RACISM

[1.1] Carol Ammons, state representative for this district, has asked to speak to a meeting of the Prairie Greens. Carol refused to vote against SB1761, a shameful measure supporting apartheid by US client Israel. She would not have voted in favor of South African apartheid.

[1.2] The Salaita affair at UIUC shows that Israeli apartheid has a more effective lobby in Illinois than South African apartheid did a generation ago, although both racist regimes were supported by the US government for its own foreign policy purposes.

[1.3] Both our local legislators, Democrat state senator Scott Bennett and Democratic state representative Carol Ammons, refused to vote against Senate Bill 1761. Both were recorded as “NV” – not voting on the measure. It should be clear that they refused to vote against racism.

[1.4] The bill, actively promoted by the government of Israel, directed that state monies (like university pension funds) be removed from companies that observed the boycott of business conducted in the territories illegally occupied by Israel.

[1.5] SB1761 is part of the attack by the government of Israel, repeated across the US, on the BDS (boycott/divestment/sanctions) movement. While the BDS movement is not above criticism, it should lead to a discussion of Israeli apartheid – and its support by our government – and that is what the government of Israel wants to avoid, by the circuitous route of passing laws like SB1761 through US state legislatures. (Compare the resolution – HR35 – passed by the California state legislature, which condemns racism and anti-Semitism at schools in the State of California: it conflates anti-Semitism and protected speech critical of Israel; the University of Illinois is hardly unfamiliar with that stratagem <http://mondoweiss.net/…/california-state-assembly-passes-re…>.)

[1.6] “Within Israel, discrimination against non-Jews is severe; the land laws are just the most extreme example. But it is not South African–style apartheid. In the occupied territories, the situation is far worse than it was in South Africa, where the white nationalists needed the black population: it was the country’s workforce, and as grotesque as the bantustans were, the nationalist government devoted resources to sustaining and seeking international recognition for them. In sharp contrast, Israel wants to rid itself of the Palestinian burden. The road ahead is not toward South Africa, as commonly alleged, but toward something much worse.” [Noam Chomsky]

[1.7] “The Israeli state has never been more violent, the blood toll of Palestinian civilians never so high. In 2014, the Israeli military and security forces killed more than 2,300 Palestinians and wounded another 17,000. That’s the worst carnage since 1967, when the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza intensified in the wake of the Six Day War. During the height of the last Israeli rampage in Gaza last summer, more than 500,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. And, according to a recent UN Report titled Fractured Lives, more than 100,000 of them remain homeless. Detentions of Palestinians inside Israeli prisons are also on the rise. As of the end of February of this year, more than 6,600 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons and IDF detention centers, the most in five years. So the gears of the killing machine grind on with impunity, each slaughter only serving to embolden more killing.” [J. St. Clair]

PART 2 – TAXES

[2.1] After 40 years of accelerating increase in inequality in the US – and the craven surrender of the Democratic party (see Walter Benn Michaels, “The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality,” 2007) – the solution is nevertheless clear enough: tax the possessors of wealth – “high net worth individuals” (HINWIS). In Illinois, the Democrats tried to do that in the last session, with their (limited) “millionaires tax,” but there’s some question how serious they were. But it is the right approach: we should simply distinguish for tax purposes the income people need to live and the income used to play the stock market – “investable assets.”

[2.2] We should resist any proposal to expand property taxes or the sales tax – or to start taxing retirement income. That confuses the two types of income. Illinois is fifth in the list of states with number of people with a net worth of $30 million or more – UHINWIs, “ultra-high net worth individuals” (after CA, NY, TX, and FL). These are the Illinoisans who should be taxed, not those with investable assets less than $1 million.

[2.3] Democratic state senator Scott Bennett and Democratic state representative Carol Ammons held a ‘Joint Town Hall’ rally last Thursday (7/9). They blamed the wretched Governor Rauner for the state’s budget impasse. In fact, it’s entirely in the Democrats’ hands. As Paul Mueth pointed out at the meeting, the Democrats have veto-proof majorities in both houses. They could pass a budget and the taxes – primarily a financial-transactions tax (HB 106) – necessary to fund it. Ammons replied that not all those Democrat votes can be counted on. Thus the Democrats can have it both ways – they can say that they’re in favor of the spending and the taxes, but then allow enough no votes so that they won’t pass. The same thing happened with Speaker Madigan’s ‘millionaires’ tax.’ In both cases the Democrats can tell the public they’re interested in solving the problem – and then quietly show their 1% donors that they won’t do it.

[2.4] “It is absolutely bizarre to live in Illinois and watch the hand wringing and the pitiful cries of the workers and the endless articles on the budget crisis and to NEVER hear a word about HB 106, the solution to the problem. A one dollar tax on each trade on the Chicago Board of Trade, which works out to about one thousandth of one percent tax. Meanwhile, average Illinoisans are paying 8.75% sales tax! But our legislators, our pundits, our union leaders, our media just can’t imagine bringing up HB 106, because rich people are immune to taxes. Screw you, teachers! Screw you, nurses! Screw you, social workers! The rich must be coddled. The Tax That Must Not Be Named – HB 106: Revenue – Financial Transactions” [Paula Densnow].

[2.5] “The Illinois Green Party has long proposed far better answers to our state’s fiscal problems … [They include a financial transactions tax], a sales tax on speculative trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Board Options Exchange and other trading houses – a measure that could dramatically raise billions of dollars in new revenue, simply by taxing the sale of options, futures and derivatives at an infinitesimally small rate. Proposals for creation of a public bank, and for implementation of a sales tax on speculation have been introduced by State Representative Mary Flowers, in H.B. 107 and H.B. 106, respectively. The Illinois Green Party urges support for these bills.”
PART 3 – ELECTIONS

[3.1] As the Obama administration drags on to its murderous conclusion, it’s clear that it’s even more neocon (secret war around the world) and more neolib (secret TPP, TTIP, etc.) than its predecessor was. (To be clear, neoliberalism means using the government to secure the profits of the 1%; neoconservatism means using the military to secure the profits of the 1%. Both major parties are of course neoliberal and neoconservative.)

[3.2] The state Democratic party is a continuation of the national party by local means: it is
~ pro-war (not opposing SB 1761 – support for Israeli apartheid = the way the Obama admin. supports its stationary aircraft carrier), and
~ pro-Wall St. (not approving HB 106 – the financial transaction tax = the way to end the state’s fiscal problems).
It’s time to reject pro-war/pro-Wall St. parties and their candidates. We’ve killed a lot of people at home and abroad by not doing so.

[3.3] SB1761 – like a similar measure in Congress – is a law with some teeth. The legislation requires pension funds to stop investing money in foreign companies that have boycotted Israel or businesses that operate in ‘territories under the control of Israel’ [i.e., the territories illegally occupied by Israel]. Illinois should not be shielding Israel from boycotts protesting human rights abuses and settlements that are illegal under international law. (See more at: “Congress and state legislatures are on the warpath against BDS” <http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/congress-legislatures-against>.)

[3.4] A boycott is a tactic (not a principle) and so must be efficaciously in the interest of the victims, in this case the victims of Israeli apartheid. But the effectiveness of this particular tactic is indicated by the lengths to which the Israeli government (and its US sympathizers) are willing to go to stop it. Even the South African government a generation ago didn’t go so far as to pressure US state legislators to stop boycotts of South African apartheid. Scott Bennett, Carol Ammons, and other Illinois legislators have timidly given in to bullying, aided Israeli oppression, and should be ashamed.

[3.5] Some of our colleagues and comrades in the PrairieGreens think the party should not run candidates in the local legislative elections in 2016, because Bennett [52nd district] and Ammons [103rd district] are liberals. SB 1761 – and the behavior of the Democrats in the legislature in regard to the budget and taxes – argue that not to do so would be a mistake. The Illinois state democrats are Syriza – the latter as tragedy, the former as farce…

[3.6] “The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) is a green political party in the United States founded in 1984 as a federation of state green parties. With its founding, the Green Party of the United States became the primary national Green organization in that country, eclipsing the Greens/Green Party USA, which emphasized non-electoral movement building … The party promotes environmentalism and social justice with policy principles in nonviolence, grassroots democracy and participatory democracy, etc…”

“If you’ve studied the sciences or engineering – especially petroleum engineering, according to a study done by Georgetown University – maybe you’ll be able to earn enough money to pay your student debt. But most of you have wasted your money, with degrees in subjects that won’t help you understand the real world we live in or earn an extra dime in it. Many of you have actually spent the best years of your lives, and borrowed a fortune, to learn things that aren’t true. History, economics, government, politics – for every useful and truthful insight you may have learned, there are probably 100 more that were buried under claptrap.”

The university as we know it predates capitalism. It was invented a thousand years ago in Europe as a means of intellectual control – a system for licensing scholars by the church and the state. In that millennium, many of the greatest European spirits – from Erasmus to Marx – were driven out of the university. Erasmus, in one of his brief stops at a university – Cambridge, in England – writes, “There is a great absence here, everyone being away for fear of the plague. Of course, when everyone is here, there’s a great absence here as well.”

For largely accidental reasons, I’ve been privileged to attend and teach in some of the most prestigious eductional institutions in the US for more than half a century. What have I learnt? The truth of American philosopher John Dewey’s observation from a century ago, which my TV colleague Ron Szoke often quotes:

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

If I could advise my youthful self at my college commencement, I would begin with, “Stop thinking about tomorrow. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof” – an editorial comment on the Sermon on the Mount from the gospel according to Matthew. (“The same words, in Hebrew, are used to express the same thought in the Rabbinic Jewish saying dyya l’tzara b’shaata (דיה לצרה בשעתה), ‘the suffering of the present hour is enough for it.’ It is also similar to the Epicurean advice of writers such as Anacreon and Horace — quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere [avoid asking what the future will bring].”)

I wish I could have taken seriously the revolutionary advice Matthew is commenting on:

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.’

It certainly does: it says it’s not “principled” at all but just an attempt to restore the pre-1979 US control of Gulf oil flows, which rested upon a tripod of Saudi Arabia-Israel-Iran – united as US clients.

Since WWII the US has demanded control of (not just access to) Mideast energy resources – which “gives it indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region” (Brzezinski). That’s what the re-incorporation of Iran (with SA & Israel however grudgingly on board) promises.

Seymour Hersh: Obama’s Entire Account Of bin Laden’s Death Is One Big Lie; This Is What Really Happened

The last time famed US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made news in the global media was with his massive, 5000-word expose from December of 2013 “Whose sarin?” revealing the true motives behind the Syrian near-war of 2013 including what we had said from the very beginning: the very professionally created YouTube clips showing the consequences of what was said to have been an Assad poison gas attack, were nothing but a fake (subsequent reports identified the propaganda source as Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose entire operation has been funded by an unidentified European country.)

Fast forward to today when in a report whose word count doubles his previous record for the London Review of Books, Hersh targets a topic near and dear to the hearts of many Americans: the story of the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. Or rather the completely false and, according to Hersh, fabricated story, one made up entirely by the US president and spoon fed for popular consumption with the aid of a Hollywood blockbuster whose entire plot line is, if Hersh is correct, one big lie as well.

In a nutshell, and one really needs to read Hersh’s magnum opus as no amount of abbreviation will do it justice, Hersh accuses Obama of not only taking credit for the al Qaeda leader’s death, but fabricating the story that resulted from what has been widely reported to have been a Navy seal incursion into bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. As a result the military and intelligence communities were forced to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

Hersh uses several sources for his refutation of the official narrative, including Asad Durrani, who was head of the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency in the early 1990s, as well as various American sources, of which the major source “is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports.”

Hersh also uses two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command, and also had information “from inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately with news of bin Laden’s death.”

Needless to say, the White House did not respond to Hersh’s requests for comment.

that the two most senior Pakistani military leaders knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms;

that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US,

and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

Hersh notes that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission:

… a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.

At the end bin Laden was murdered, plain and simple:

‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

Then the original plan was foiled, when Obama decided to make things up on the fly, not least of all because of the downed helicopter whose flaming end scuttled the original narrative:

Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact.

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following.

The widely distributed story involving the Navy seals was also fabricated:

Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But, according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to Afghanistan.

As a result of Obama’s rash decision to improvise lies, the seal had to be silenced:

The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’

There is much more on how the White House and the Pentagon scrambled to make up a narrative that made sense in light of Obama’s improvisation in Hersh’s entire story below, and as Hersh notes, “it was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash.”

But what about the CIA’s report on torture and the resultant “transformations” in the US secret service? Well, simple: according to Hersh “the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade. Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’ or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful consequences as a result of the report.

The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!” Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia. The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’

Fast forwarding to Hersh’s conclusion, none of it should come as a surprise to anyone who has put in more than a second of thought into the now daily lies spewed by the various US government branches in its endless attempt to preserve Pax American around the globe and Pax NSA within the US police state:

Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

No, Obama is not facing re-election. Unfortunately, the person under whose watch the bin Laden “raid” took place, Hillary Clinton, is facing election. And sadly for America, once she takes over Obama’s throne, the surge in high-level lying, secret prisons, drone attacks, immunity from checks and balances and forced silencing of all naysayers, no matter the coast, will truly show the world what happens when a former superpower enters its terminal decline phase.

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command. I also received information from inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

*

It began with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.

The US initially kept what it knew from the Pakistanis. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another location. So only a very small number of people were read into the source and his story,’ the retired official said. ‘The CIA’s first goal was to check out the quality of the informant’s information.’ The compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with Pakistani employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would serve as a contact point with the ISI; it attracted little attention because Abbottabad is a holiday spot full of houses rented on short leases. A psychological profile of the informant was prepared. (The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.)

‘By October the military and intelligence community were discussing the possible military options. Do we drop a bunker buster on the compound or take him out with a drone strike? Perhaps send someone to kill him, single assassin style? But then we’d have no proof of who he was,’ the retired official said. ‘We could see some guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because there’s no commo coming from the compound.’

In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said. ‘It just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was just too crazy. The president’s position was emphatic: “Don’t talk to me about this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.”’ The immediate goal of the CIA leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command was to get Obama’s support. They believed they would get this if they got DNA evidence, and if they could assure him that a night assault of the compound would carry no risk. The only way to accomplish both things, the retired official said, ‘was to get the Pakistanis on board’.

During the late autumn of 2010, the US continued to keep quiet about the walk-in, and Kayani and Pasha continued to insist to their American counterparts that they had no information about bin Laden’s whereabouts. ‘The next step was to figure out how to ease Kayani and Pasha into it – to tell them that we’ve got intelligence showing that there is a high-value target in the compound, and to ask them what they know about the target,’ the retired official said. ‘The compound was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. ‘“You mean you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?”’

‘It didn’t take long to get the co-operation we needed, because the Pakistanis wanted to ensure the continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet-proof limousines and security guards and housing for the ISI leadership,’ the retired official said. He added that there were also under-the-table personal ‘incentives’ that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. ‘The intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agree – there was the carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We also did a little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you’ve got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies’ – the Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan – ‘would not like it.’

A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’

Despite their constant public feuding, American and Pakistani military and intelligence services have worked together closely for decades on counterterrorism in South Asia. Both services often find it useful to engage in public feuds ‘to cover their asses’, as the retired official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone attacks, and co-operate on covert operations. At the same time, it’s understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI’s strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul; the Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir.

Adding to the tension was the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, often depicted in the Western press as an ‘Islamic bomb’ that might be transferred by Pakistan to an embattled nation in the Middle East in the event of a crisis with Israel. The US looked the other way when Pakistan began building its weapons system in the 1970s and it’s widely believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. It’s understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of strong military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is mirrored in Pakistan.

‘The Pakistani army sees itself as family,’ the retired official said. ‘Officers call soldiers their sons and all officers are “brothers”. The attitude is different in the American military. The senior Pakistani officers believe they are the elite and have got to look out for all of the people, as keepers of the flame against Muslim fundamentalism. The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us.’

Like all CIA station chiefs, Bank was working undercover, but that ended in early December 2010 when he was publicly accused of murder in a criminal complaint filed in Islamabad by Karim Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose son and brother, according to local news reports, had been killed by a US drone strike. Allowing Bank to be named was a violation of diplomatic protocol on the part of the Pakistani authorities, and it brought a wave of unwanted publicity. Bank was ordered to leave Pakistan by the CIA, whose officials subsequently told the Associated Press he was transferred because of concerns for his safety. The New York Times reported that there was ‘strong suspicion’ the ISI had played a role in leaking Bank’s name to Khan. There was speculation that he was outed as payback for the publication in a New York lawsuit a month earlier of the names of ISI chiefs in connection with the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. But there was a collateral reason, the retired official said, for the CIA’s willingness to send Bank back to America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their co-operation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known. The Pakistanis could say: “You’re talking about me? We just kicked out your station chief.”’

*

The bin Laden compound was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal are trained. ‘Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,’ the retired official said, ‘to keep him under constant supervision.’

The risks for Obama were high at this early stage, especially because there was a troubling precedent: the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. That failure was a factor in Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Obama’s worries were realistic, the retired official said. ‘Was bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of failure?’ After all, as the retired official said, ‘If the mission fails, Obama’s just a black Jimmy Carter and it’s all over for re-election.’

Obama was anxious for reassurance that the US was going to get the right man. The proof was to come in the form of bin Laden’s DNA. The planners turned for help to Kayani and Pasha, who asked Aziz to obtain the specimens. Soon after the raid the press found out that Aziz had been living in a house near the bin Laden compound: local reporters discovered his name in Urdu on a plate on the door. Pakistani officials denied that Aziz had any connection to bin Laden, but the retired official told me that Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25 million reward the US had put up because the DNA sample had showed conclusively that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad. (In his subsequent testimony to a Pakistani commission investigating the bin Laden raid, Aziz said that he had witnessed the attack on Abbottabad, but had no knowledge of who was living in the compound and had been ordered by a superior officer to stay away from the scene.)

Bargaining continued over the way the mission would be executed. ‘Kayani eventually tells us yes, but he says you can’t have a big strike force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or there is no deal,’ the retired official said. The agreement was struck by the end of January 2011, and Joint Special Operations Command prepared a list of questions to be answered by the Pakistanis: ‘How can we be assured of no outside intervention? What are the defences inside the compound and its exact dimensions? Where are bin Laden’s rooms and exactly how big are they? How many steps in the stairway? Where are the doors to his rooms, and are they reinforced with steel? How thick?’ The Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cell – a Navy Seal, a CIA case officer and two communications specialists – to set up a liaison office at Tarbela Ghazi for the coming assault. By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Utah, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack.

The US had begun to cut back on aid to Pakistan – to ‘turn off the spigot’, in the retired official’s words. The provision of 18 new F-16 fighter aircraft was delayed, and under-the-table cash payments to the senior leaders were suspended. In April 2011 Pasha met the CIA director, Leon Panetta, at agency headquarters. ‘Pasha got a commitment that the United States would turn the money back on, and we got a guarantee that there would be no Pakistani opposition during the mission,’ the retired official said. ‘Pasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining about Pakistan’s lack of co-operation with the American war on terrorism.’ At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden’s capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: ‘We needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,’ Pasha said, according to the retired official. ‘The ISI was using bin Laden as leverage against Taliban and al-Qaida activities inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. They let the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership know that if they ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would turn bin Laden over to us. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to pay.’

At one of his meetings with Panetta, according to the retired official and a source within the CIA, Pasha was asked by a senior CIA official whether he saw himself as acting in essence as an agent for al-Qaida and the Taliban. ‘He answered no, but said the ISI needed to have some control.’ The message, as the CIA saw it, according to the retired official, was that Kayani and Pasha viewed bin Laden ‘as a resource, and they were more interested in their [own] survival than they were in the United States’.

A Pakistani with close ties to the senior leadership of the ISI told me that ‘there was a deal with your top guys. We were very reluctant, but it had to be done – not because of personal enrichment, but because all of the American aid programmes would be cut off. Your guys said we will starve you out if you don’t do it, and the okay was given while Pasha was in Washington. The deal was not only to keep the taps open, but Pasha was told there would be more goodies for us.’ The Pakistani said that Pasha’s visit also resulted in a commitment from the US to give Pakistan ‘a freer hand’ in Afghanistan as it began its military draw-down there. ‘And so our top dogs justified the deal by saying this is for our country.’

*

Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan’s army and air defence command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn’t be announced straightaway. All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.

‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

*

At the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls of the compound, injuring many on board. ‘The guys knew the TOT [time on target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going in,’ the retired official said. The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk, with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a fire visible for miles. Two Chinook helicopters had flown from Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to Abbottabad. But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be reconfigured as a troop carrier. The crash of the Black Hawk and the need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone. ‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold otherwise.)

‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’ Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition, like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the retired official said. ‘Twenty tense minutes. The Black Hawk is still burning. There are no city lights. No electricity. No police. No fire trucks. They have no prisoners.’ Bin Laden’s wives and children were left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate. ‘Despite all the talk,’ the retired official continued, there were ‘no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks. The Seals weren’t there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. And they were not intelligence experts gathering information inside that house.’

On a normal assault mission, the retired official said, there would be no waiting around if a chopper went down. ‘The Seals would have finished the mission, thrown off their guns and gear, and jammed into the remaining Black Hawk and di-di-maued’ – Vietnamese slang for leaving in a rush – ‘out of there, with guys hanging out of the doors. They would not have blown the chopper – no commo gear is worth a dozen lives – unless they knew they were safe. Instead they stood around outside the compound, waiting for the bus to arrive.’ Pasha and Kayani had delivered on all their promises.

*

The backroom argument inside the White House began as soon as it was clear that the mission had succeeded. Bin Laden’s body was presumed to be on its way to Afghanistan. Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact.

Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger:

Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the American people what had just happened, I reminded everyone that the techniques, tactics and procedures the Seals had used in the bin Laden operation were used every night in Afghanistan … it was therefore essential that we agree not to release any operational details of the raid. That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say. Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong … Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and at one point, told [the national security adviser, Tom] Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail.

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following. Obama said that his administration had discovered that bin Laden was in Pakistan through ‘a possible lead’ the previous August; to many in the CIA the statement suggested a specific event, such as a walk-in. The remark led to a new cover story claiming that the CIA’s brilliant analysts had unmasked a courier network handling bin Laden’s continuing flow of operational orders to al-Qaida. Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But, according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to Afghanistan.

Gates wasn’t the only official who was distressed by Obama’s decision to speak without clearing his remarks in advance, the retired official said, ‘but he was the only one protesting. Obama didn’t just double-cross Gates, he double-crossed everyone. This was not the fog of war. The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed. And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly.’ There was a legitimate reason for some deception: the role of the Pakistani walk-in had to be protected.

The White House press corps was told in a briefing shortly after Obama’s announcement that the death of bin Laden was ‘the culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work’ that focused on tracking a group of couriers, including one who was known to be close to bin Laden. Reporters were told that a team of specially assembled CIA and National Security Agency analysts had traced the courier to a highly secure million-dollar compound in Abbottabad. After months of observation, the American intelligence community had ‘high confidence’ that a high-value target was living in the compound, and it was ‘assessed that there was a strong probability that [it] was Osama bin Laden’. The US assault team ran into a firefight on entering the compound and three adult males – two of them believed to be the couriers – were slain, along with bin Laden. Asked if bin Laden had defended himself, one of the briefers said yes: ‘He did resist the assault force. And he was killed in a firefight.’

The next day John Brennan, then Obama’s senior adviser for counterterrorism, had the task of talking up Obama’s valour while trying to smooth over the misstatements in his speech. He provided a more detailed but equally misleading account of the raid and its planning. Speaking on the record, which he rarely does, Brennan said that the mission was carried out by a group of Navy Seals who had been instructed to take bin Laden alive, if possible. He said the US had no information suggesting that anyone in the Pakistani government or military knew bin Laden’s whereabouts: ‘We didn’t contact the Pakistanis until after all of our people, all of our aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.’ He emphasised the courage of Obama’s decision to order the strike, and said that the White House had no information ‘that confirmed that bin Laden was at the compound’ before the raid began. Obama, he said, ‘made what I believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory’. Brennan increased the number killed by the Seals inside the compound to five: bin Laden, a courier, his brother, a bin Laden son, and one of the women said to be shielding bin Laden.

Asked whether bin Laden had fired on the Seals, as some reporters had been told, Brennan repeated what would become a White House mantra: ‘He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know … Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks … living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield … [It] just speaks to I think the nature of the individual he was.’

Gates also objected to the idea, pushed by Brennan and Leon Panetta, that US intelligence had learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts from information acquired by waterboarding and other forms of torture. ‘All of this is going on as the Seals are flying home from their mission. The agency guys know the whole story,’ the retired official said. ‘It was a group of annuitants who did it.’ (Annuitants are retired CIA officers who remain active on contract.) ‘They had been called in by some of the mission planners in the agency to help with the cover story. So the old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time, there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA agents who had conducted torture.

‘Gates told them this was not going to work,’ the retired official said. ‘He was never on the team. He knew at the eleventh hour of his career not to be a party to this nonsense. But State, the agency and the Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid. The Special Forces command was apoplectic. They prided themselves on keeping operational security.’ There was fear in Special Operations, the retired official said, that ‘if the true story of the missions leaked out, the White House bureaucracy was going to blame it on the Seals.’

The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’

Within days, some of the early exaggerations and distortions had become obvious and the Pentagon issued a series of clarifying statements. No, bin Laden was not armed when he was shot and killed. And no, bin Laden did not use one of his wives as a shield. The press by and large accepted the explanation that the errors were the inevitable by-product of the White House’s desire to accommodate reporters frantic for details of the mission.

One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day, a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O’Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to bin Laden. O’Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals thought ‘We were going to die.’ ‘The more we trained on it, the more we realised … this is going to be a one-way mission.’

But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition. The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O’Neill met a deep-seated need, the retired official said: ‘Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen.’

There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable question that would arise from an uncontested assault. Where were bin Laden’s guards? Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world would have around-the-clock protection. ‘And one of those killed had to be the courier, because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him. The Pakistanis had no choice but to play along with it.’ (Two days after the raid, Reuters published photographs of three dead men that it said it had purchased from an ISI official. Two of the men were later identified by an ISI spokesman as being the alleged courier and his brother.)

*

Five days after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove … the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group … He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’

These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the US for questioning.

‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said. ‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained important.’

In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaida’.

In May 2012, the Combating Terrrorism Centre at West Point, a private research group, released translations it had made under a federal government contract of 175 pages of bin Laden documents. Reporters found none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid. Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ‘limited contact with the outside world outside his compound’.

The retired official disputed the authencity of the West Point materials: ‘There is no linkage between these documents and the counterterrorism centre at the agency. No intelligence community analysis. When was the last time the CIA: 1) announced it had a significant intelligence find; 2) revealed the source; 3) described the method for processing the materials; 4) revealed the time-line for production; 5) described by whom and where the analysis was taking place, and 6) published the sensitive results before the information had been acted on? No agency professional would support this fairy tale.’

*

In June 2011, it was reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post and all over the Pakistani press that Amir Aziz had been held for questioning in Pakistan; he was, it was said, a CIA informant who had been spying on the comings and goings at the bin Laden compound. Aziz was released, but the retired official said that US intelligence was unable to learn who leaked the highly classified information about his involvement with the mission. Officials in Washington decided they ‘could not take a chance that Aziz’s role in obtaining bin Laden’s DNA also would become known’. A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and accused of assisting the agency. ‘We went to the Pakistanis and said go after Afridi,’ the retired official said. ‘We had to cover the whole issue of how we got the DNA.’ It was soon reported that the CIA had organised a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad with Afridi’s help in a failed attempt to obtain bin Laden’s DNA. Afridi’s legitimate medical operation was run independently of local health authorities, was well financed and offered free vaccinations against hepatitis B. Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area. Afridi was later accused of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his ties to an extremist. News of the CIA-sponsored programme created widespread anger in Pakistan, and led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying.

The retired official said that Afridi had been recruited long before the bin Laden mission as part of a separate intelligence effort to get information about suspected terrorists in Abbottabad and the surrounding area. ‘The plan was to use vaccinations as a way to get the blood of terrorism suspects in the villages.’ Afridi made no attempt to obtain DNA from the residents of the bin Laden compound. The report that he did so was a hurriedly put together ‘CIA cover story creating “facts”’ in a clumsy attempt to protect Aziz and his real mission. ‘Now we have the consequences,’ the retired official said. ‘A great humanitarian project to do something meaningful for the peasants has been compromised as a cynical hoax.’ Afridi’s conviction was overturned, but he remains in prison on a murder charge.

*

In his address announcing the raid, Obama said that after killing bin Laden the Seals ‘took custody of his body’. The statement created a problem. In the initial plan it was to be announced a week or so after the fact that bin Laden was killed in a drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and that his remains had been identified by DNA testing. But with Obama’s announcement of his killing by the Seals everyone now expected a body to be produced. Instead, reporters were told that bin Laden’s body had been flown by the Seals to an American military airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and then straight to the USS Carl Vinson, a supercarrier on routine patrol in the North Arabian Sea. Bin Laden had then been buried at sea, just hours after his death. The press corps’s only sceptical moments at John Brennan’s briefing on 2 May were to do with the burial. The questions were short, to the point, and rarely answered. ‘When was the decision made that he would be buried at sea if killed?’ ‘Was this part of the plan all along?’ ‘Can you just tell us why that was a good idea?’ ‘John, did you consult a Muslim expert on that?’ ‘Is there a visual recording of this burial?’ When this last question was asked, Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, came to Brennan’s rescue: ‘We’ve got to give other people a chance here.’

‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’. Brennan didn’t mention that Muslim law calls for the burial service to be conducted in the presence of an imam, and there was no suggestion that one happened to be on board the Carl Vinson.

In a reconstruction of the bin Laden operation for Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden, who spoke to many senior administration officials, wrote that bin Laden’s body was cleaned and photographed at Jalalabad. Further procedures necessary for a Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, he wrote, ‘with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight, Monday morning, May 2.’ Bowden described the photos:

One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud. The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.

Bowden was careful not to claim that he had actually seen the photographs he described, and he recently told me he hadn’t seen them: ‘I’m always disappointed when I can’t look at something myself, but I spoke with someone I trusted who said he had seen them himself and described them in detail.’ Bowden’s statement adds to the questions about the alleged burial at sea, which has provoked a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests, most of which produced no information. One of them sought access to the photographs. The Pentagon responded that a search of all available records had found no evidence that any photographs had been taken of the burial. Requests on other issues related to the raid were equally unproductive. The reason for the lack of response became clear after the Pentagon held an inquiry into allegations that the Obama administration had provided access to classified materials to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty. The Pentagon report, which was put online in June 2013, noted that Admiral McRaven had ordered the files on the raid to be deleted from all military computers and moved to the CIA, where they would be shielded from FOIA requests by the agency’s ‘operational exemption’.

McRaven’s action meant that outsiders could not get access to the Carl Vinson’s unclassified logs. Logs are sacrosanct in the navy, and separate ones are kept for air operations, the deck, the engineering department, the medical office, and for command information and control. They show the sequence of events day by day aboard the ship; if there has been a burial at sea aboard the Carl Vinson, it would have been recorded.

There wasn’t any gossip about a burial among the Carl Vinson’s sailors. The carrier concluded its six-month deployment in June 2011. When the ship docked at its home base in Coronado, California, Rear Admiral Samuel Perez, commander of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group, told reporters that the crew had been ordered not to talk about the burial. Captain Bruce Lindsey, skipper of the Carl Vinson, told reporters he was unable to discuss it. Cameron Short, one of the crew of the Carl Vinson, told the Commercial-News of Danville, Illinois, that the crew had not been told anything about the burial. ‘All he knows is what he’s seen on the news,’ the newspaper reported.

The Pentagon did release a series of emails to the Associated Press. In one of them, Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reported that the service followed ‘traditional procedures for Islamic burial’, and said none of the sailors on board had been permitted to observe the proceedings. But there was no indication of who washed and wrapped the body, or of which Arabic speaker conducted the service.

Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence, that the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place. One consultant told me that bin Laden’s remains were photographed and identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. The consultant added: ‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. The cover story was that it had been flown to the Carl Vinson.’ The second consultant agreed that there had been ‘no burial at sea’. He added that ‘the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish Obama’s military credentials … The Seals should have expected the political grandstanding. It’s irresistible to a politician. Bin Laden became a working asset.’ Early this year, speaking again to the second consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and said: ‘You mean, he didn’t make it to the water?’

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slighest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

*

It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash. ‘We’ve had a four-year lapse in co-operation,’ the retired official said. ‘It’s taken that long for the Pakistanis to trust us again in the military-to-military counterterrorism relationship – while terrorism was rising all over the world … They felt Obama sold them down the river. They’re just now coming back because the threat from Isis, which is now showing up there, is a lot greater and the bin Laden event is far enough away to enable someone like General Durrani to come out and talk about it.’ Generals Pasha and Kayani have retired and both are reported to be under investigation for corruption during their time in office.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade. Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’ or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful consequences as a result of the report.

The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!” Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia. The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’

The main theme of the committee’s 499-page executive summary is that the CIA lied systematically about the effectiveness of its torture programme in gaining intelligence that would stop future terrorist attacks in the US. The lies included some vital details about the uncovering of an al-Qaida operative called Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was said to be the key al-Qaida courier, and the subsequent tracking of him to Abbottabad in early 2011. The agency’s alleged intelligence, patience and skill in finding al-Kuwaiti became legend after it was dramatised in Zero Dark Thirty.

The Senate report repeatedly raised questions about the quality and reliability of the CIA’s intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. In 2005 an internal CIA report on the hunt for bin Laden noted that ‘detainees provide few actionable leads, and we have to consider the possibility that they are creating fictitious characters to distract us or to absolve themselves of direct knowledge about bin Ladin [sic].’ A CIA cable a year later stated that ‘we have had no success in eliciting actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s location from any detainees.’ The report also highlighted several instances of CIA officers, including Panetta, making false statements to Congress and the public about the value of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the search for bin Laden’s couriers.

Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

Many self-described “pro-life” groups are not really pro-life, one Catholic bishop wrote

The blog post by Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Florida mainly dealt with accusations raised by the Population Research Institute. The pro-life group has attacked Catholic charities operating in Africa for allegedly providing contraceptives and working alongside family planning groups.

But Lynch also complained about pro-life groups in general.

“I am convinced that many so called Pro-Life groups are not really pro-life but merely anti-abortion,” he wrote.

The bishop observed that pro-life groups were silent about the execution of a severely mentally ill man in Florida. John Ferguson, a 65-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, was executed by the state of Florida via lethal injection last Monday.

“Many priests grow weary of continual calls to action for legislative support for abortion and contraception related issues but nothing for immigration reform, food aid, and capital punishment,” Lynch added.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has stated that ending abortion and euthanasia are primary goals in building a “culture of life” in the country. However, the USCCB has also repeatedly included prohibitions on firearms, abolishment of the death penalty, and strengthening of welfare programs as part of the “culture of life.”

This article, Catholic bishop: Pro-life groups ‘not really pro-life but merely anti-abortion’, is syndicated from Raw Story and is posted here with permission.

]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2892012-08-11T12:12:03Z2012-08-11T12:12:03Z
]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2872012-08-08T17:11:08Z2012-08-08T17:11:08ZArguments about the authorship of the Shakespearean corpus have increased in frequency and ferocity in the last decade, particularly between “Oxfordians” (those who hold that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the poems and plays) and “Stratfordians” (those who hold with the man from Stratford). A rise in polemical temperature has resulted, it is argued, in part because new evidence has appeared, notably Roger Stritmatter’s analysis of Oxford’s Geneva Bible — and in part because considerable scholars are reconsidering old evidence, as in Diana Price’s marvelous Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, which appeared last year. The questions are in fact interesting, not to be compared to the work of the perhaps apocryphal 19th century German philologist who spent his life proving that the Iliad was not composed by Homer, but by another blind Greek — of the same name…

You will be relieved to hear that I will not be fretting my quarter hour upon this stage about the status quaestionis of the so-called “authorship debate,” nor even considering the abstract question of whether genius can bestow information. No, in this symposium devoted to “Shakespeare in America,” I want to consider the fate in America of only one small argument, what might be called the “argument from snobbism.”

The argument is as old as the authorship question itself. You are undoubtedly familiar with it. Partisans of the traditional attribution have frequently asserted that Oxfordians (as well as champions of other candidates, such as Bacon and Marlowe) simply cannot abide the fact that a man from the middle classes created those works of genius. In their snobbery they must, it is averred, find a proper aristocratic replacement for the demotic sage.

Let me remark in passing that there is something odd about this argument or indeed about any argument that seeks to refute a position by denigrating the motives of those who hold it, or even by showing an interest on the part of those who hold it. Obviously, the truth of a position and the motive for holding it can be entirely separate matters. We might be able to adapt Eliot’s couplet, “The last temptation is the greatest treason, / To think the right thing for the wrong reason,” but I doubt it: ideas, it has been said, are not responsible for the people who believe in them.

But the argument from snobbism obviously has at least some rhetorical force, so I want to consider its fate in the “land of the free,” where presumably the democratic ideal opposes snobbism, and the concomitant tendency to celebrate the genius of the people would tend to support the traditional attribution.

The argument depends on a notion of class, one of those categories “over against which [as the late Erich Heller said] we are rightly critical, but without which we cannot do.” And at least since Weber, sociologists have been much more comfortable speaking of status rather than (or perhaps in addition to) class, but here I intend to be perfectly traditional: one’s class position, at lest in the last instance, depend s upon one’s role in the process of production.

Someone who thought a good bit about democracy in America also had some interesting things to say about class. Alexis de Tocqueville in his essay on The Old Regime and the French Revolution contrasts the class situation in France and England in the 18th century. In England, he says, it was virtually impossible to pass from one class to another, but he classes dwelt together in considerable amity. In France by contrast it was indeed possible to pass and quickly from one class to another, but the classes despised one another.

The United States after the Civil War seems to have been a tertium quid. In spite of a uniquely bloody labor history (“I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” said robber baron Jay Gould), there was an impression in America of cordiality among classes joined to the possibility of rising and falling. A generation of historical studies have questioned the extent of social mobility in late 19th century America, and the real class relations of the Gilded Age may have existed behind an ideological facade; Frederick Jackson Turner may have been right to suggest that the frontier was the essential safety valve for class pressure in the United States.

But it was in this context that America produced a soi-disant poet of democracy in Walt Whitman (1819-44-92), and it was Whitman who produced on the eve of the Civil War what Emerson called “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” Thirty years later, in 1888, rising 70 and in poor health, Whitman published November Boughs, which contains the essay entitled, “What Lurks Behind Shakespeare’s Historical Plays?” He writes, “We all know how much mythus there is in the Shakespeare question as it stands to-day. Beneath a few foundations of proved facts are certainly engulf’d far more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance — tantalizing and half suspected — suggesting explanations that one dare not put in plain statement.” In plain statement, he’s speaking of the Bard’s bisexuality, and of his own.

“But coming at once to the point,” he continues — he is of course evading the point with which he began — “the English historical plays are to me not only the most eminent as dramatic performances … but form, as we get it all, the chief in a complexity of puzzles. Conceiv’d out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism — personifying in unparallel’d ways the mediaeval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) — only one of the ‘wolfish earls’ so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works — works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.”

So here is the vox populi of the American literary 19th century speaking up for an aristocratic author. And he goes much further, to suggest an important connection between American democracy and the Shakespearean canon. “Will it not indeed be strange if the author of ‘Othello’ and ‘Hamlet’ is destin’d to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting on record the first full exposé — and by far the most vivid one, immeasurably ahead of doctrinaires and economists — of the political theory and results, or the reason-why and necessity for them which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace?”

He suggests that “a future age of criticism … may discover in the [historical] plays … the scientific (Baconian?) inauguration of modern Democracy — furnishing realistic and first-class artistic portraitures of the mediéal world, the feudal personalities, institutes, in their morbid accumulations, deposits, upon politics and sociology, — may penetrate to that hard-pan, far down and back of the ostent of to-day, on which (and on which only) the progressism of the last two centuries has built this Democracy which now holds secure lodgment over the whole civilized world.” He even suggests that providing a picture of world so inhuman that it needs to be replaced by a democratic polity was “the more or less conscious, purpose of him who fashion’d those marvellous architectonics”!

For Whitman then, some version of the snobbish argument was the very reason for the existence of a good bit of the corpus, the author’s need to describe what needed destruction, “the dragon-rancors and stormy feudal splendor of mediaeval caste.” And Whitman thinks that it is destroyed, or largely so, and Shakespeare “stands entirely for the mighty aesthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and democratic, the sceptres of the future.” Indeed, American democracy must supersede aristocratic Shakespeare. “Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakespeare — a style supremely grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short of the grandest sort, at any rate for fulfilling and satisfying modern and scientific and democratic American purposes.”

Finally, the author’s social position is clear from how he depicts other classes. “The low characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen — all in themselves nothing — serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies (exquisite as they certainly are) bringing in admirably portray’d common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the élite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy.”

Very well then contradicting himself, Whitman concludes, “But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the riches Shakespeare has left us — to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality — to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams.”

Twenty years after November Boughs, one of the few figures with a better claim than Whitman’s to be the authentic voice of classic American literature spoke up on our subject. In 1909 Mark Twain (1835-1910), then past 70 (this subject seems to attract elderly men), published his little book, Is Shakespeare Dead? Twain had always been more drawn to feudal Europe than Whitman, from The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889) to his book at the turn of the century on Joan of Arc (1896), whom Twain thought “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”

It is an old man’s garrulous but not unlearned book, based on “fifty years’ interest in the matter,” he says (p.2). The title Is Shakespeare Dead? Seems to refer to the obscurity in which the man from Stratford died. Twain offers his “opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure and unimportant. And not only in great London but also in the little village where he was born, where he died and was buried … if he had been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had much to tell about him many and many a year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact concerned with him.” Twain contrasts his own circumstances with Shakespeare’s: “if he had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village on the Missouri” (p. 68).

Twain’s disregard of the man is matched by his admiration of the works. “HE HADN’T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD [Twain’s emphasis]. There is no way of getting around that deadly fact … It’s quite plain significance — to any but those thugs [viz., Stratfordian scholars] (I do not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations. The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them it seem a pity the world did not find it out. He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely a NOM DE PLUME for another man to hide behind. If he had been less intemperately solicitous about his bones [i.e., in his epitaph], and more solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important. They will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure until the last sun goes down” (p. 67).

Twain tells of being an apprentice riverboat pilot under the instruction of one George Ealer (who appears in several chapters of Life on the Mississippi). While Twain steered, Ealer would declaim Shakespeare by the hour, with “explosive interlardings” of directions to the apprentice. This practice gave Twain his principal argument against his Stratfordian instructor, “that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s words, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer ways” (p. 6). When Ealer replies that Shakespeare learnt it from books, Twain counters “that a man can’t handle glibly and easily and conformably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served … When I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn’t teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover” (p. 7).

Shakespeare’s familiarity with a wide range of technical knowledge, particularly the law, is Twain’s principal reason for believing that the man from Stratford could not have written the works. The academics’ Shakespeare, says Twain “is a Brontosaurus: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris” (p. 21). “Who did write these Works, then [he asks]? I wish I knew” (p. 47). Twain proclaims himself a “Brontosaurian [who] doesn’t really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN’T” (p. 22; Twain’s emphasis). He surveys Shakespeare’s supposed biography — in a manner not unlike Diana Price’s — and concludes that the man from Stratford is debarred by class position from being a candidate for the authorship.

So finally, who takes class seriously? The holders of the argument from snobbism, who contend that Shakespeare’s class background is an insignificant matter in the face of his genius? That the native hue of resolution could overcome any lacunae in formal education? Or those who contend that class is true, class is earnest, and gravitas is not its goal? That class really does set out barriers of information, of association, and even of sympathy that were difficult to cross in the England of 400 years ago?

It certainly seems clear that two classic American authors thought so, and thought that the Shakespearean corpus in all its genius was shot through with the matter of class, so much so that the portrait of the artist as a young lord — or a young lawyer — could be descried. They agreed with Trollope that “The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography.” It was in the United States of America, the existence of which posed the question of class (however much the question has been buried in our own time), that this question about Shakespeare could abide.

]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2742011-07-29T16:06:53Z2011-07-29T16:06:53Z
]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2612011-02-14T21:02:58Z2011-02-14T21:02:58Z
]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2662011-09-25T07:08:33Z2011-02-09T04:16:17ZThen Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”
Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him.” –The gospel according to John 18.33-8

In a five-year period in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, I encountered three figures from a slightly earlier generation who it seemed to me put together the scattered themes of my eduction and offered a set of ideas with some intellectual coherence – that in short were true. Although there was some overlap, the three would by no means entirely agree with one another. And the annealing of their ideas for me was to some extent accomplished in the fire from the US assaults on southeast Asia and the ever larger questions of history, politics and ethics that those crimes posed.

That was in fact rather late in my formal eduction – I was doing a doctorate in the history of Christian thought and taking my first academic job (at Notre Dame), where I thought I was supposed to tell the truth to people even younger than I. In spite of time spent in schools considered to be the best in twentieth century America, I was still too ignorant to realize that the regnant attitude to truth in the American academy was that proposed by the Roman prefect in the occupied province of Judaea in the first century. And the source of the attitude was the same, too – people under authority: people who had to give up control over what made them human – their conscious work of head and hands – in order even to eat regularly. Some did that all too willingly; some less so.

A crucial element in those years for anyone with the leisure to think about theology and politics, history and philosophy, literature and psychology – was in fact biblical studies, which in the modern world led the way for establishing theology, history and literature as critical disciplines. That was the origin of “exegesis” and “hermeneutics” as technical terms. In the passage above, for example, it became clear that the world meant not the natural world but the present political and social arrangements – as it does throughout the gospel according to John.

I. NOAM CHOMSKY (1928- )“I think that the libertarian socialist concepts – and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through anarchism – are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.”

In the midst of the five years under consideration (1968-73), I attended a lecture at MIT by a man who was already – just past forty – perhaps the most famous intellectual in America. Noam Chomsky as a young man had done for the field of linguistics what Einstein had done for physics – perhaps even more, for he had changed the nature of linguistics as a discipline from a predominantly historical field, philology, into a cognitive science. He was also known as a vigorous social critic and and an opponent of the US war on southeast Asia. His essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” may have been the single most important tract in the anti-war movement in the American universities of the 1960s – and it has lost none of its power. The responsibility of intellectuals – “to speak the truth and to expose lies” – in a vicious and unjustified war in southwest Asia today remains what it was then, when the US was conducting a similar war in southeast Asia.

The lecture I heard – “Government in the Future” – is still in print, forty years later, and still quite worth reading. The question is the role of the state in advanced industrial society. Chomsky considers “four somewhat idealized positions … first, classical liberal, second, libertarian socialist, third, state socialist, fourth, state capitalist.”

It’s important to note that “libertarian” has acquired a new meaning in the years since this lecture was delivered. Chomsky said recently,

“The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism. In the US, which is a society much more dominated by business, the term has a different meaning. It means eliminating or reducing state controls, mainly controls over [business] corporations. It is a sort of ultra-rightism.”

Speaking of what the contemporary US means by libertarianism – perhaps best expressed by US Representative Ron Paul – Chomsky nevertheless says, “I agree with them on a lot of things. On the drug issue, they tend to oppose state involvement in the drug war, which they correctly regard as a form of coercion and deprivation of liberty. You may be surprised to know that some years ago, before there were any independent left journals, I used to write mainly for the Cato Institute journal.”

As an alternative to the two great world systems of the day, Soviet communism and American capitalism, Chomsky proposed a position that was a critique of both from the Left – where Left had the meaning it originally acquired in the French national assembly of 1793: more democratic, as opposed to the more authoritarian direction of the Right. One consequence of this usage is that Leninism (Bolshevism, Soviet communism) had to be seen as a right-wing Marxism, because of its authoritarian character.

“It seems to me,” said Chomsky, in that austere lecture room with a view of the Charles River basin, “that the ideology of state socialism, that is, what has become of Bolshevism, and of state capitalism – the modern welfare state – are regressive and highly inadequate social theories, and a large number of our really fundamental problems stem from a kind of incompatibility and inappropriateness of these dominant social forms to modern industrial societies.”

An hour’s painstaking analysis led to his conclusion. “We have today the technical and material resources to meet man’s animal needs. We have not developed the cultural and moral resources – or the democratic forms of social organization – that make possible the humane and rational use of our material wealth and power. Conceivably, the classical liberal ideals as expressed and developed in their libertarian socialist form are achievable. But if so, only by a popular revolutionary movement, rooted in wide strata of the population and committed to the elimination of repressive and authoritarian institutions, state and private. To create such a movement is a challenge we face and must meet if there is to be an escape from contemporary barbarism.”

Taking on the world is not a simple or easy political task. In the United States, said Chomsky, “Roughly speaking, I think it’s accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. The people, so-called, do exercise an occasional choice among those who Marx once called ‘the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling class.'”

As a libertarian socialist, Chomsky opposes from the Left what came to be called socialism in the twentieth century. In his 1986 article “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism,” he wrote, “When the world’s two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.”

A decade earlier, his Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood described how it happened that Israel was becoming America’s chief client in the Mideast, far and away the greatest recipient of US foreign and military aid, so that it could be (in spite of corrupting influences on its own society) America’s enforcer in controlling Mideast energy resources. (The US never needed Mideast energy for its home industries – even today it imports little oil from the Mideast – but control of energy gives the US an unparalleled advantage over it real economic rivals in Europe and northeast Asia.) “There should be a peripheral region of gendarme states (Turkey, Iran under the Shah, Israel joined after the ‘67 war, Pakistan was there for a while). These states were to be the local cops on the beat while the US would be the police headquarters.”

In a recent interview, Chomsky discussed political thought with a theme unique to the Hebrew scriptures:

“The word ‘prophet’ is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

“I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, ‘prophets,’ who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called ‘false prophets.’
“People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do…
“I particularly admired [Amos’] comments that he’s not an intellectual …’ I’m not a prophet, I’m not the son of a prophet, I’m a simple shepherd.’ So he translated ‘prophet’ correctly. He’s saying, ‘I’m not an intellectual.’ He was a simple farmer and he wanted just to tell the truth. I admire that.”

This from the man The New York Times once called, “The most important intellectual of the present.” At least for once, they were right.

II. HERBERT MCCABE OP (1926-2001)“…the only God who matters is the unfathomable mystery of love because of which there is being and meaning to anything that is … we are united with God in matter, in our flesh and his flesh … Christianity is not an ideal theory, it is a praxis, a particular kind of practical challenge to the world.”

Several years before hearing Chomsky’s lecture, I had encountered another prophet in his sense who drew explicitly on the Hebrew bible. In 1968 I picked up from the front table of a Boston shop an odd-looking little book from a British publisher, a series of lectures on ethics, Law, Love and Language, by Herbert McCabe, a member of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans). In witty and agreeable prose McCabe contrasted an ethics of rules (law) with the then-fashionable situation ethics (love) – and suggested that ethics finally had to do with the meaning of human behavior (language).

“In these essays I want to take a quick look at three starting-points from which we might think about ethics, three different ways of throwing light on what ethics is all about. None of them is a complete account of ethics and I think at least the first two are fairly seriously inadequate; nevertheless they may each be of some help.”

McCabe’s approach to ethics was equally indebted to Aristotle and Wittgenstein. In the years since its publication, that book has taken a place in a rising academic philosophic specialty known as “virtue [i.e., Aristotelian] ethics,” especially owing to the work of McCabe’s friend and colleague Alasdair MacIntyre. McCabe’s contribution to virtue ethics is summed up in a posthumous work (he died in 2001), The Good Life: Ethics and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Remarkably, in the course of his “quick look,” McCabe – among other observations – drew important lessons from Aquinas’ philosophy on the doctrine of God, from modern biblical studies on the meaning of the decalogue, and from marxism on the nature of politics.

He had learnt from biblical studies that the ten commandments were an account of the God of Israel:

“Yahweh is the God of freedom and there are to be no other gods. ‘The prohibition of “other gods” is the basic demand made of israel’ [Martin Noth]. The important thing is not just to be religious, to worship something somehow. The important thing is to find, or be found by, the right God and to reject and struggle against the others. The worship of any other god is a form of slavery; to pay homage to the forces of nature, to the spirit of a particular place, to a nation or race or to anything that is too powerful for you to understand or control is to submit to slavery and degradation. The Old Testament religion begins by saying to such gods ‘I do not believe and I will not serve.’ The only true God is the God of freedom. The other gods make you feel at home in a place, they have to do with the quiet cycle of the seasons, with the familiar mountains and the county you grew up in and love; with them you know where you are. But the harsh God of freedom calls you out of all this into a desert where all the old familiar landmarks are gone, where you cannot rely on the safe workings of nature, on spring-time and harvest, where you must wander over the wilderness waiting for what God will bring. This God of freedom will allow you none of the comforts of religion. Not only does he tear you away from the old traditional shrines and temples of your native place, but he will not even allow you to worship him in the old way. You are forbidden to make an image of him by which you might wield numinous power, you are forbidden to invoke his name in magical rites. You must deny the other gods and you must not treat Yahweh as a god, as a power you could use against your enemies or to help you to succeed in life. Yahweh is not a god, there are no gods, they are all delusions and slavery. You are not to try to comprehend God within the conventions and symbols of your time and place; you are to have no image of God because the only image of God is man.”

(Using McCabe’s account, I’ve written elsewhere about the political significance of the decalogue: The Subversive Commandments.”.)

The brief book contains a consideration of ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church) and sacramental theology that comports well with the best of what was being produced by Liberation Theology at the same time.

With an Aristotelian view of society and a Wittgensteinian view of language, McCabe concludes, “It will I suppose, be clear from what I have said that the relevance of Christianity to human behaviour is primarily a matter of politics, it is concerned first of all with the [forms] of communication, the structures of relationship in which [people] live … To speak with vast and misleading generality, there is in the world at the moment a conflict between the dispossessed and the rich … It seem to me that the first thing a Christian will want to say about his moral position is that he belongs with this revolution. I say ‘belongs with it’ rather than ‘belongs to it’ because the Christian revolution goes in and through this kind of revolution to something deeper, to the ultimate alienation of man which is sin and the ultimate transformation which is death and resurrection.”

In an important article in 1987, McCabe took up what seems a difficult political problem for the Christian theologian, “The class struggle and Christian love”:

“What is wrong with capitalism, then, is not that it involves some people being richer than I am. I cannot see the slightest objection to other people being richer than I am; I have no urge to be as rich as everybody else, and no Christian (and indeed no grown-up person) could possibly devote his life to trying to be as rich or richer than others. There are indeed people, very large numbers of people, who are obscenely poor, starving, diseased, illiterate, and it is quite obviously unjust and unreasonable that they should be left in this state while other people or other nations live in luxury; but this has nothing specially to do with capitalism, even though we will never now be able to alter that situation until capitalism has been abolished. You find exactly the same conditions in, say, slave societies and, moreover, capitalism, during its prosperous boom phases, is quite capable of relieving distress at least in fully industrialised societies – this is what the ‘Welfare State’ is all about. What is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antagonism, and it is precisely here that it comes in conflict with Christianity. Capitalism is a state of war [i.e., class struggle], but not just a state of war between equivalent forces; it involves a war between those who believe in and prosecute war as a way of life, as an economy, and those who do not. The permanent capitalist state of war erupts every now and then into a major killing war, but its so-called peacetime is just war carried on by other means.”

Already in 1968 he had written as follows:

‘The quarrel of the Christian with the Marxist about God is not a matter of the validity of the ‘five ways’[Aquinas’ proofs of God], nor is it a matter of whether a man should have the right to worship whatever way he likes in his spare time, it concerns the nature of revolution and the interpretation of Jesus. If the Marxist is right and there is no God who raised Jesus from the dead then the Christian pre-occupation with death as the ultimate revolutionary act is a diversion from the real demands of history; if the Christian is right then the Marxist is dealing with revolution only at a relatively superficial level, he has not touched the ultimate alienation involved in death itself, and for this reason his revolution will betray itself; the liberation will erect a new idol…”

“Christianity alone, because it is the articulate presence of Christ, the future of mankind, cannot (however hard it sometimes seems to try) wholly betray its mission. As it seems to me, like St Peter and the twelve, we remain Christians because there is nowhere else to go: if Christianity is not the revolution, nothing else is.”

McCabe’s religious order was founded in the thirteenth century to talk to people, and he was quite good at it. (One of the best theological debates I ever heard occurred at a climbers’ hostel half-way up the highest peak in County Kerry, Carrauntoohil; it involved McCabe and a pub-owner; she provided a disputatio equal to the Dominican tradition.) The following is from one of his sermons:

“Jesus died of being human. What was outstanding about him was not that he was something more than human, that he was a superman or superstar. It was just that he was more intensely human, more intensely one of us than we dare to be. He lacked the illusions and deceptions by which we try to protect ourselves from our humanity, try to protect ourselves from our failure. He was like to us in all things but sin, in all things but self-deception. He shows us God simply by showing us the reality of being human. And it is not at all the reality we like to think it is. Really being human is not at all what humanists believe in their simple-minded way. Really being human means being in the kind of muddle and mess that Jesus was in. And that is where God is.”

III. PERRY ANDERSON (1938- )“…there is only one contender as a general account of human development across the centuries from primitive societies to present forms of civilizations. That is historical materialism. All other partial versions are derivations, or fragments, by contrast. Marxism alone has produced at once a sufficiently general and sufficiently differential set of analytic instruments to be able to integrate successive epochs of historical evolution, and their characteristic socio-economic structures, into an intelligible narrative. In this respect, indeed, it remains unchallenged not only within socialist, but also non-socialist culture as a whole. There is no competing story.”

In 1974 I read two books from the editor of the British journal New Left Review, Perry Anderson. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State were the first two volumes of a projected four volume Marxist general history of the Common Era. Volume three, which appeared only in parts, was to consider the sweep of bourgeois revolution from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and volume four was to summarize capitalism triumphant.

Anderson’s industry and insight have produced a large collection of material since then – must more than could be encapsulated in a fourth volume. But the first two were revelatory, works of intellectual synthesis that have still not been surpassed. In the early 1970s I had ordered them from London – they were were only tardily available in the US – and began reading them in the front seat of my car in the post office parking lot when they finally arrived. I wasn’t disappointed.

Anderson’s work represents the finest flowering of the New Left. Interestingly enough, today a new generation of scholars is taking up Anderson’s Marxist history and combining it with the revived Aristotelian ethics and politics of which McCabe wrote. See, e.g., Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia (2008), edited by Kelvin Knight and Paul Blackledge.

Since I was then writing a dissertation on ecclesiology in the Reformation, I read with interest Anderson’s insightful obiter dictum on the church of Rome:

“Strange historical object par excellence, whose peculiar temporality has never coincided with that of a simple sequence from one economy or polity to another, but has overlapped and outlived several in a rhythm of its own, the Church has never received theorization within historical materialism … Issued from a post-tribal ethnic minority, triumphant in late antiquity, dominant in feudalism, decadent and renascent under capitalism, the Roman Church has survived every other institution — cultural, political, juridical or linguistic — historically coeval with it … Its own regional autonomy and adaptability — extraordinary by any comparative standards — have yet to be seriously explored…”

CONCLUSION

Tom Stoppard’s great play, “Travesties” – I saw the London production in the years I’ve been considering – is set in Zurich during World War I and presents historical characters including Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara. Its central character (also historical) is an obscure English consular official, Henry Carr. The curtain line is his, as he reminisces on art and politics:

“Great days … Zurich during the war. Refugees, spies, exiles, painters, poets, writers, radicals of all kinds. I knew them all. Used to argue far into the night … at the Odeon, at the Terrasse … I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might has well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary … I forget the third thing.”

The poets – I’ve thought for a while – usually get there first, even though they often don’t seem to know where they have in fact got to; so – as I try to remember the third thing – here’s a concluding word from a disgraced poet:

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs, or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.
–Pound, from Canto 81.1

###

C. G. Estabrook
Champaign IL
Candlemas 2011

]]>1adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2562011-09-25T07:10:02Z2011-02-08T21:36:14Z‘Nobody lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel but on a stand so that it gives light to the all in the house.’ This may have been one of Jesus’ many little jokes, because according to one distinguished biblical scholar there probably were people who did exactly that. There were, it seems, three conflicting laws to be obeyed on the night of the Sabbath. One must light a candle; one should have sex to honour God; and one must not have sex with the lights on. Solution! Light a candle and then put it under a bucket!

This is probably not a problem that many of us face. For us the challenge is how to be a light of the world. How do we shed light on people and on creation? There is a saying attributed to the Talmud, but I have not been able to track it down there and so I suspect it comes from California; ‘We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.’ So an angry person sees a world filled with violence and threat. A greedy person always has an eye for what can be eaten. Herbert McCabe, Dominican brother, gave up smoking when he became aware that he was looking at everyone, the moment that they came into the room, as a potential source of cigarettes! A consumer lives in a vast shopping mall. A lustful person sees lot of objects of sexual gratification. In Anna Karenina, when Anna falls out of love with her husband, she ceases to see his face. She comes obsessed with his big hairy ears. His face is just a space between his ears!

Jean Vanier describes a sad man who came to see him in his office. Jean was sitting with Jean Claude who has Down’s syndrome. The visitor looked at Jean Claude and said, ‘Isn’t it sad that there are children like that.’ But Jean said: ‘The great pain in all of this was that this man was totally blind. He had barriers inside of him and was unable to see that Jean Claude was happy. You could not find anyone more relaxed and happy than Jean Claude…Which is the greater handicap? Is it that there are men like Jean Claude or is it that Mr Normal has this barrier which renders him totally blind to the beauty of people.’ Sad people see a sad world.

One of the ancient words for baptism is ‘illumination.’ Our eyes should be opened. And in the gospels, perhaps the first challenge is to see the poor. Often the poor are invisible. We do not want to see them. Outside Blackfriars, there are always people begging, and you can fear to catch their eye. Once you see each other, then bang goes the money for the expedition to the pub that night. The first reading from Isaiah asks us not to turn our back on our own flesh. But we may fear to see because it may turn our lives upside down.

Or how, in our violent world, can you shed Christ’s light on the person who threatens you? Father Raphael is a peace maker in Colombia. He spends a lot of his time going between the government, the military, the paramilitaries and the drug gangs, and trying to open their eyes to each other. He is often at the end of a gun barrel. He said, ‘I always remind myself that behind that pointed gun is a human being, somebody’s son or daughter.’

Gay people are often not seen in Christ’s light! Gay people may be seen as threats, as predators, as temptations, or whatever. You have to shed Christ’s life so that people see that gay people love, have friendships, have gifts such like every one else.

Cardinal Basil Hume, clarifying Catholic teaching on homosexuality, wrote, ‘Love between two persons, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to be treasured and respected. ..When two persons love they experience in a limited manner in this world what will be their unending delight when one with God in the next. To love another is in fact to reach out to God who shares his lovableness with the one we love. To be loved is to receive a sign, or a share, of God’s unconditional love.’

We are also to be the salt of the earth. The point of salt, I think, is that it brought out the taste of things. If you use salt well, then the fish tastes fishier, the eggs are more egg-like, and the veg. even more vegetable. I believe that chilli does this as well, although my brethren accuse me of smothering the taste of everything with chilly. But it is not true. We could equally be called the chilli of the world.

So we shed light on people by delighting in them, by savouring them, taking pleasure in their quirky individuality, recognising that each is a unique creation of God. When the world becomes just one big market place, and everything is for sale, then everything becomes alike. Everything has a price tag. Everything is coloured dollar green. Our vocation is to restore the savour of the world.

Remember that saying: ‘We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.’ So we need a profound spiritual discipline to become the sort of people who see clearly with the light of Christ, and savour the world. We have to tackle the roots of greed that make us want to eat people, or the anger that makes us see them with hostility, and the competitiveness that makes them look like rivals. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.’ Now we cannot see God, but we can look at each in God’s light. We have to purify our hearts, so that we see people with clear eyes. Then we shall delight in them as God does.

{Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP gave this homily for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time on 6 February 2011 at the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory}
_________________
*Jean Vanier quote from: Essential Writings Selected by Carolyn Whitney-Brown London 2008 p.54

A member of AWARE, David Green, sent the following letter to the newspaper at the University of Illinois:

The vast majority of 9/11 observances in this country cannot be seen as politically neutral events. Implicit in their nature are the notions that lives lost at the World Trade Center are more valuable than lives lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere; that the motives of the 9/11 attackers had nothing to do with genuine grievances in the Islamic world regarding American imperialism; and that the U.S. has been justified in the subsequent killing of hundreds of thousands in so-called retaliation.

The observance at Saturday’s football game was no different. A moment of silence was followed by a military airplane flyover; in between, Block-I students chanted “USA, USA.” This was neither patriotism nor remembrance in any justifiable sense, but politicization, militarism, propaganda and bellicosity. The University of Illinois is a public institution that encompasses the political views of all, not just the most (falsely) “patriotic.” Athletic planners should cease such exploitation for political purposes. They might at least consider how most Muslim students, American or otherwise, would respond to this nativist display; or better, Muslims and others that live their lives under the threat of our planes, drones and soldiers.

The overwhelmingly white, privileged, Block-I students should be ashamed of their obnoxious, fake-macho, chicken-hawk chant, while poverty-drafted members of their cohort fight and die in illegal and immoral wars for the control of oil. University administrators need to eliminate from all events such “patriotic” observances, which in this country cannot be separated from implicit justifications for state-sponsored killing.

–David Green, University Academic Professional

Posted on the Daily Illini website on 15 September, under the headline Block-I chant portrays ‘neither patriotism nor remembrance,’the letter brought forth over five hundred responses (which the Daily Illini editors have since unfortunately removed from the website.) What was remarkable was how many of the responses were uninformed, jingoist, and even racist attacks on Green’s views. (They also demonstated a surprising inability to use a spell-checker). The letter and its response brought inquiries from outside media (including The Bill O’Reilly Show), and Green was interviewed on several radio programs, on WGN and elsewhere.

On the cable television program, News from Neptune (Fridays at 7pm on channel 6 in C-U and on Facebook), David Green made the interesting suggestion that the hysterical response to his letter actually represents the repressed debate about the war. Although 70% of Americans think that the Long War in the Mideast is not worth the loss of life, that opinion has grown without our hearing it in the media or in Congress. And it seems that the administration and most media outlets want to keep it that way

A series of FBI raids in late September – agents kicking down doors and invading homes with guns drawn – targeted groups that have been working against US government war policies in the Mideast and Latin America. The Obama administration said that they were looking for “material support” for terrorism, but many think that the raids – and follow-up grand jury investigations – are attempts to intimidate the anti-war movement.

The Obama administration has shown that it’s willing to use brutal and illegal weapons in its “war on terror” – which most of us realize is creating terrorists far faster than it’s deterring them. President Obama has designated at least one American citizen – not even in a war-zone – to be killed on sight by the CIA or US military, because he’s suspected of association with terrorists. That’s not what the authors of the Constitution had in mind, and they provided the remedy of impeachment for such criminal uses of presidential power.

The war in the Middle East should be the principal issue in the fall elections. Whatever the other failures and crimes of the Obama administration, only in its war policy is it actively killing people – in our name. And whatever one might say about Obama’s mendacious speech on 31 August – announcing a US “withdrawal” from Iraq – it did acknowledge the connection of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the US is also killing people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – and threatens Iran. The US is fighting a single war from Palestine to Pakistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa. And it’s not to “stop terrorism,” or Al Qaeda. (Mr. Obama has to say that, because the only constitutional authority he has for war is the “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” passed by Congress a week after the 9/11 attacks and specifically directed against terrorism.) In fact, he is simply continuing the generation-long neo-colonial policy of the US in the Middle East to exercise control over the world’s greatest concentration of energy resources. (Not because we need the oil – contrary to what politicians in both parties claim, the US imports very little oil from the Middle East – but in order to give us an advantage over our economic rivals in Europe and Asia.)

If you are appalled that the Obama administration – against the wishes of three out of four Americans – is conducting an unjustified war in the Middle East and misrepresenting the reason for it, call your Congressional representatives. Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Roland Burris, and Senator Dick Durbin can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Tell them that the U.S. has no business killing people in the Middle East for resisting our invasion and occupation.

Your protest makes a difference: Congressman Johnson, who voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, now says that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more funding for war in the Middle East – and he has kept his promise by voting that way.

Resistance to the war is growing. In September, fourteen anti-war activists who had walking onto Creech Air Force Base in Nevada last year to protest the US assassinations in the Middle East by rockets from drone airplanes were able to turn “a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America’s new-found taste for remote-controlled warfare,” as one Las Vegas newspaper summed up a “stunning day in court.” More on this important event – in an article by John Dear, SJ – is at <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/18-0>.

You can join a local peace group that is working to end the US war in the Mideast. In Champaign-Urbana, one local peace group is AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort, members and friends of which produced this leaflet for the 2 October 2010 Main Event – our monthly peace demonstration at Main and Neil Streets in downtown Champaign. We meet every Sunday at 5pm in the McKinley Foundation, 5th and Daniel Streets in Champaign, near the UIUC campus. We discuss the war and what can be done against it. Visitors are welcome – and see our Facebook page.AWARE is also happy to provide speakers and/or discussion leaders on the Mideast war and related issues. Write <cge@shout.net>. AWARE is composed of people opposed to the war, but it is not affiliated with any other group or political party.

AWARE presents AWARE on the Air each Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, cable channel 6. Each week we bring you comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government’s betrayal of our democratic principles.

END THE U.S. WAR FOR OIL IN THE MIDDLE EAST

BRING ALL UNITED STATES TROOPS HOME

STOP PAYING FOR WAR FROM PALESTINE TO PAKISTAN

###

]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2302010-09-05T01:04:47Z2010-09-05T00:50:19Z[The following leaflet was distributed on 4 September 2010 at the regular monthly demonstration by the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana IL.]

~ THE WAR IS NOT OVER ~ IT’S EXPANDING INSTEAD ~
OUR GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO KILL PEOPLE IN THE MIDEAST; PRESIDENT OBAMA CONTINUES TO MISLEAD US ABOUT WHY

Last Tuesday night President Obama gave a speech about the war that his administration is conducting in the Middle East. Unfortunately, his account was so misleading as to amount to a substantial lie:[1] The US war against Iraq is not over. President Obama has just changed the names. The war that the Bush administration called “Operation Iraqi Freedom” when it occupied the country, the Obama administration now calls “Operation New Dawn”; what the Bush administration called “brigade combat teams,” the Obama administration now calls “advisory and assistance brigades.” There are still 50,000 US troops and a similar number of mercenaries in Iraq – which has the second largest known reserves of oil in the world; if Iraq produced mainly cabbage, would those US troops and mercs still be there?
[2] The US is expanding our war against Afghanistan. President Obama sharply escalated President Bush’s war in Afghanistan, although 75% of Afghans are in favor of negotiations including the Taliban, whom the US calls terrorists (or, as Secretary of State Clinton says, “Really bad guys”). There are now more than 110,000 troops under U.S. command in Afghanistan, including more than 34,000 European troops from NATO. The NATO Secretary-General said, “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West, [protect sea routes used by tankers], and other crucial infrastructure” of the energy system.
[3] The US is expanding our undeclared war against Pakistan. The incoming Obama administration sneered that he Bush administration was only taking “baby steps” in targeting people in Pakistan (with which we are not at war) for assassination by drone rocket; the Obama administration has greatly expanded that and other death-squad operations. So the strongest armies in the world are killing people to “stop terrorism” in villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan – even while Pakistan is flooded.
[4] The US is expanding our “secret” war against other countries in the region. The US is also killing people in Yemen and Somalia. And it continues to threaten Iran. A look at the map will show why – these countries are on the approaches to the Middle East. The US insists on controlling by various means a circle with a 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf. “Terrorists,” according to the US government, are those who oppose the US occupation and control of the Middle East.
IT’S NOT “BECAUSE OF 9/11″ OR TO “STOP TERRORISM”

The real reason for the Obama administration’s ongoing war seems to be the long-standing US policy of control over the largest energy-producing region of the world. And not because we need the gas and oil ourselves: the US imports very little oil from the Middle East for use here at home; most of the energy resources that we consume in the US come from the Americas and West Africa. But control of Mideast oil and gas gives the US government a powerful bargaining chip in its relations with its real economic competitors in the world – the Europe and East Asia (China and Japan).
Obama’s war will continue until more Americans speak up loudly and reject it. A majority of Americans do reject it – 72% say that the war is not worth the loss of life and other other costs to the country – even though we rarely hear that view expressed in the news. But for the moment our government doesn’t seem to care about our opinions.

If you are appalled that the Obama administration – against the wishes of three out of four Americans – is conducting an unjustified war in the Middle East and misrepresenting the reason for it, call your Congressional representatives. Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Roland Burris, and Senator Dick Durbin can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Tell them that the U.S. has no business killing people in the Middle East for resisting our invasion and occupation.(Your protest makes a difference: Congressman Johnson, who voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, now says that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more funding for war in the Middle East – and he has kept his promise by voting that way.)

Resistance in the military is growing. On August 23 five peace activists – three veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and one military spouse – blockaded six buses carrying Fort Hood soldiers deploying to Iraq. Police made no arrests, but instead beat the activists out of the streets using automatic weapons and police dogs. The action, organized by “Fort Hood Disobeys,” was aimed at preventing the deployment of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment soldiers to what the veterans termed an illegal and immoral occupation.

You can join a local peace group that is working to end the US war in the Mideast. In Champaign-Urbana, one local peace group is AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort, members and friends of which produced this leaflet for the 4 September 2010 Main Event – our monthly peace demonstration at Main and Neil Streets in downtown Champaign. We meet every Sunday at 5pm in the McKinley Foundation, 5th and Daniel Streets in Champaign, near the UIUC campus. We discuss the war and what can be done against it. Visitors are welcome – and see our Facebook page. AWARE is also happy to provide speakers and/or discussion leaders on the Mideast war and related issues. Write <cge@shout.net>. AWARE is composed of people opposed to the war, but it is not affiliated with any other group or political party.

AWARE presents AWARE on the Air each Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, cable channel 6. Each week we bring you comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government’s betrayal of our democratic principles.
END THE U.S. WAR FOR OIL IN THE MIDDLE EAST
BRING ALL UNITED STATES TROOPS HOME
STOP PAYING FOR WAR FROM PALESTINE TO PAKISTAN﻿

###

]]>0adminhttp://newsfromneptune.com/http://newsfromneptune.com/?p=2232010-08-14T19:38:30Z2010-08-14T19:38:30Z[This is a section – which I take to be within the limits of fair use – from a book by the late Oxford theologian Herbert McCabe, OP – “God Matters” (London, 1987 – the title is at least a triple pun). It’s part of a larger argument in which McCabe, a Wittgensteinian Marxist, was an active participant.]

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to
carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws
light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To
prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need
asking, that the world poses these questions for us.
To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the
validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts
set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity,
the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research
which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions
by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the
growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It Is perfectly
possible to say we now have science (we didn’t have It In the eighth
century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it
is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all
the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that,
by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last
word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to
take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which
discouraged such radical questioning. In this century we have seen
totalitarian societies which have been extremely keen on improving their
technology and answering detailed questions within the accepted framework
of science, but extremely hostile to the kind of radical thinking I am
envisaging; the kind of society where Wernher von Braun Is honoured and
Einstein is exiled. I also think that the same effect can be produced in
more subtle ways in societies that don’t look totalitarian. And of course
it was notoriously produced In the Church confronted by Galileo. The
asking of radical questions is discouraged by any society that believes in
itself, believes it has found the answers, believes that only its
authorised questions are legitimate.

Faced with such hostility or such incomprehension, you can, of course,
say: well, wait and see: you will find that in spite of everything,
science will make startling and quite unexpected changes, that our whole
world view will shift in ways we cannot now predict or imagine. But that
is just to assert your belief. And this I think is parallel to asserting
your belief in God. I think a belief in God — in the sense of a belief in
the validity of the kind of radical question to which God would be the
answer — is a part of human flourishing and that one who closes himself
off from it is to that extent deficient. For this reason I welcome, such
belief in God, but what I am asking myself now is not whether I believe,
but what grounds I have for such belief. And here again I think the
analogy with proving the validity of fundamental thinking in science is
helpful. How, after all, do we show that there is still a long and
probably unexpected road to travel in science? By pointing to anomalies in
the present scientific world picture. If your world picture includes, for
example, the idea of ether as the medium in which light waves occur, then
there is an anomaly if it turns out to be impossible to determine the
velocity of a light source with respect to the ether; and so on. Now in a
parallel way, it seems to me, proofs for the existence of God point to
anomalies in a world picture which excludes the God question. It is, it
seems to me, quite anomalous to hold that while it is legitimate and valid
to ask ‘How come?’ about any particular thing or event in the world, it is
illegitimate and invalid to ask it about the whole world. To say that we
aren’t allowed to ask it merely because we can’t answer it seems to me to
be begging the question. The question is: Is there an unanswered question
about the existence of the world? Can we be puzzled by the existence of
the world instead of nothing? I can be and am; and this is to be puzzled
about God.

The question ‘How come?’ can have a whole lot of different meanings and be
asked at several levels, and the deeper the question you ask about an
individual thing the more it is a question about a world to which that
thing belongs; there is finally a deepest question about a thing which is
also a question about everything. Let me explain that enigmatic remark.

Supposing you ask ‘How come Fido?’ You may be asking whether his father is
Rover or whether it was that promiscuous mongrel down the lane. In such a
case the answer is satisfactorily given by naming Fido’s parents. At this
level no more need be said; the question is fully answered at this level.
But now suppose you ask: ‘But how come Fido’s a dog?’ The answer could be:
‘His parents were dogs, and dogs just are born of other dogs’. Here you
have moved to what I call a deeper level of questioning and begun to talk
about what dogs are. You are saying: for Fido to be is for him to be adog, and Fido’s parents are the sort of things whose activities result in
things being dogs. Now your original question ‘How come Fido?’ has
deepened into a question about the dog species. It remains a question
about this individual dog Fido, but it is also a question about dogs —
not about dogs in the abstract, but about the actual dog species in the
world. Your question ‘How come Fido?’ at this new level is a question ‘How
come dogs anyway?’

And of course there is an answer to that too in terms of things like
genetics and natural selection and what not. Here we have a new and deeper
level of the question ‘How come Fido?’ — still a question about this
particular puppy, but one that is answered in terms of its membership of a
still wider community; no longer now simply the community of dogs, but the
whole biological community within which dogs come to be and have their
place. Then of course we can ask a question about Fido at a deeper level
still. When we ask how come the biological community, we no doubt answer
in terms of biochemistry. (I am not of course pretending that we actually
have the answers to all these questions, as though we fully understood how
it came about, and had to come about, that there are now dogs around the
place, but we expect eventually to answer these questions.)

And now we can go on from the level of biochemistry to that of physics and
all the time we are asking more penetrating questions concerning Fido and
each time we go further in our questioning we are seeing Fido in a wider
and wider context.

We can put this another way by saying that each time we ask the question
we are asking about Fido over against some other possibility. Our first
question simply meant: How come Fido is this dog rather than another; he’s
Rover’s son rather than the mongrel’s son. At the next level we were
asking: How come he’s a dog rather than, say, a giraffe. At the next
level: How come he’s a living being rather than an inanimate, and so on.

Now I want to stress that all the time we are asking about this individual
Fido. It is just that we are seeing further problematics within him.
Fido’s parents brought it about that he is this dog not another, but in
that act they also brought it about that he is this dog (not a giraffe),
that he is this living dog, that he is this biochemically complex, living
dog; that he is this molecularly structured, biochemically complex, living
dog, and so on. We are probing further into what it is for Fido to come to
be and always by noting what he is not, but might have been. Every ‘How
come’ question is how come this instead of what is not. And every time, of
course, we answer by reference to some thing or state of affairs, some
existing reality, in virtue of which Fido is this rather than what he is
not.

Now our ultimate radical question is not how come Fido exists as this dog
instead of that, or how come Fido exists as a dog instead of a giraffe,
or exists as living instead of inanimate, but how come Fido existsinstead of nothing, and just as to ask how come he exists as dog is to put
him in the context of dogs, so to ask how come he exists instead of
nothing is to put him in the context of everything, the universe or world.
And this is the question I call the God-question, because whatever the
answer is, whatever the thing or state of affairs, whatever the existing
reality that answers it we call ‘God’.

Now of course it is always possible to stop the questioning at any point;
a man may refuse to ask why there are dogs. He may say there just are dogs
and perhaps it is impious to enquire how come — there were people who
actually said that to Darwin. Similarly it is possible to refuse to ask
this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the universe is just
there. This seems to me just as arbitrary as to say: dogs are just there.
The difference is that we now know by hindsight that Darwin’s critics were
irrational because we have familiarised ourselves with an answer to the
question, how come there are dogs? We have not familiarised ourselves with
the answer to the question, how come the world instead of nothing? but
that does not make it any less arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is
to enter on an exploration which Russell was simply refusing to do, as it
seems to me. It is of course perfectly right to point out the
mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that
we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying
it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said ‘Not how the world is,
but that it is, is the mystery’.

There is indeed a difficulty about having a concept of ‘everything’, for
we ordinarily conceive of something with, so to say, a boundary around it:
this is a sheep and not a giraffe. But everything is bounded by nothing,
which is just to say that it is not bounded by anything. To put what is
the same point another way: we can have no concept of nothing, absolutely
speaking. We can use the word relatively; we can say, ‘There Is nothing in
the cupboard’ meaning there are no largish objects — we are understood
not to be saying there is no dust or no air. ‘There is nothing between
Kerry and New York’ means there is no land. It does not mean there is
absolutely nothing, no sea or fishes. The notions of everything and of
absolutely nothing, are not available to us in the sense that the notions
of sheep or scarlet or savagery are available to us. And this means that
we are asking our ultimate radical question with tools that will not do
the job properly, with words whose meaning has to be stretched beyond what
we can comprehend. It would be very strange if it were not so. As
Wittgenstein says, what we have here is the mystery. If the question of
God were a neat and simple question to be answered in terms of familiar
concepts, then whatever we are talking about, it is not God. A God who is
in this sense comprehensible would not be worth worshipping, or even of
talking about (except for the purpose of destroying him).

It is clear that we reach out to, but do not reach, an answer to our
ultimate question, how come anything instead of nothing? But we are able
to exclude some answers. If God is whatever answers our question, how come
everything then evidently he is not to be included amongst everything. God
cannot be a thing, an existent among others. It is not possible that God
and the universe should add up to make two.

Again, if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything,
it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of
anything. Whatever creation means it is not a process of making.

Again it is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he has not
the power but because, so to speak, he has too much; to interfere you have
to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are interfering with. If
God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he is alongside.
Obviously God makes no difference to the universe; I mean by this that we
do not appeal specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way
rather than that, for this we need only appeal to explanations within the
universe. For this reason there can, it seems to me, be no feature of the
universe which indicates it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the
universe is there instead of nothing. I have said that whatever God is, he
is not a member of everything, not an inhabitant of the universe, not a
thing or a kind of thing. And I should add, I suppose, that it cannot be
possible to ask of him, how come God instead of nothing? It must not be
possible for him to be nothing. Not just in the sense that God must be
imperishable, but that it must make no sense to consider that God might
not be. Of course it is still possible to say, without manifest
contradiction, ‘God might not be’, but that is because when we speak of
God by using the word ‘God’, we do not understand what we mean, we have no
concept of God; what governs our use of the word ‘God’ is not an
understanding of what God is but the validity of a question about the
world. That is why we are not protected by any logical laws from saying
‘God might not exist’ even though it makes no sense. What goes for our
rules for the use of ‘God’ does not go for the God we try to name with the
word. (And a corollary of this, incidentally, is why a famous argument for
the existence of God called the ontological argument does not work.)

What I have been saying may seem to make God both remote and irrelevant.
He is not part of the universe and he makes no difference to it. It is
therefore necessary to stress that God must be in everything that happens
and everything that exists in the universe. If Fido’s parents make Fido to
exist instead of nothing it is because in their action God is acting, just
as if a pen writes it is because in its action a writer is acting. It is
because it is God that wields every agent in the universe that agents
bring things into existence, make things new. Every action in the world is
an action of God; not because it is not an action of a creature but
because it is by God’s action that the creature is itself and has its own
activity. But more of that in the next chapter.

For the moment may I just say that it seems to me that what we often call
atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very frequently the
man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some
answer to the mystery of how come there Is anything instead of nothing, he
is denying what he thinks or has been told is a religious answer to this
question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially
Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is
some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil
Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the
universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and
enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying
this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole
Christian tradition are atheistic too.

But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any
problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the
world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question. This is the
man I compare to those who are content to ask questions within the
established framework of science, but cannot see that there are genuine
though ill-formulated questions on the frontiers. I have made a comparison
with scientific research, but just the same parallel could be made with
any kind of creative activity. The poet is trying to write a poem but he
does not know what he is trying to say until he has said it and recognised
it. Until he has done this it is extremely difficult to show that he is
writing a poem or that he could write a poem. I can show, by pointing to
the existence of bricks and cement and so on and the availability of a
workforce, that there could be more houses made. I cannot show that there
will ever be another poem.

I called this paper ‘God and Creation’ In order to indicate what I and the
mainstream Christian tradition understand by creation as a path towards
God. We come across God, So to speak, or rather we search and do not come
across him, when the universe raises for us a radical question concerning
its existence at all. And creation is the name we give to God’s answering
this question.

I hope it will be evident that creation is here being used in a quite
different sense from the way it is used by people who seek to discover the
origin of the universe (was it a big bang or a lot of little pops or
whatever). Whatever processes took place in remote periods of time is of
course in itself a fascinating topic but it is irrelevant to the question
of creation in the sense that makes us speak of God. When we have
concluded that God created the world, there still remains the scientific
question to ask about what kind of world it is and was and how, if ever,
it began. It is probably unnecessary to say that the proposition that the
universe is made by God and that everything that is, is begun and
sustained in existence by God, does not entail that the universe has only
existed for a finite time. There may be reasons for thinking that the
universe is finite in time and space but the fact that its existence
depends on God is not one of them.

Coming to know that the universe is dependent on God does not in fact tell
us anything about the character of the universe. How could it? Since
everything we know about God (that he exists and what he is not) is
derived from what we know of the universe, how could we come back from God
with some additional information about the world? If we think we can it Is
only because we have smuggled something extra into our concept of God —
for example, when we make God in our own image and ask ourselves quite
illegitimate questions like ‘What would I have done If I were God?’ It
should be evident that this is a temptation to be avoided.

There is one last thing I should like to touch on. What are we to make of
the notion of a ‘personal’ God?

I think the idea of a personal God has arisen in two quite different ways.
In the first place people have thought of God as a person because they
have thought of him as a maker — I mean they have had an image of God as
an artist or technician working away at something — and thereby
accounting for its existence. In this sense the person (in the sense of
human person) is an image of God, a picture which may be useful but could
evidently be misleading. In the second place I think people call God
personal because it seems absurd to say he is impersonal. However romantic
we may get about the great impersonal forces of nature that seem to tower
over us, we know perfectly well that they don’t. What is impersonal and
non-intelligent will, in principle, always obey us if only we know the
trick. There are people who speak of God as a great life-force, and that
is all right if they merely want to deny that he is some particular
concrete individual — evidently he is not, but we have to remember that
great forces don’t really get anything done unless they are wielded in a
context. The wind and the waves don’t achieve any aim, there is nothing
that counts as success in their thrashing around. It is only by talking
about them as though they were persons or at least as alive that we can
speak of them getting anything done, and since whatever else we mean by
God we mean what gets something done or made or existing, it seems that we
cannot think of him as merely impersonal.

Once we have denied that God Is merely impersonal we are under a
temptation to imagine him as forming Intentions or thinking out or making
up his mind, but none of this is a legitimate For us the business of being
persons is extremely closely tied but there is no reason at all to
transfer all this to God; indeed not doing so since this version of
personality associated with the fact that we are physical beings, parts of
a material whole.

We can then, I think, say that whatever accounts for the existence of the
universe cannot be limited in the way that impersonal unintelligent things
and forces are, but this does not justify us in attributing to God our own
particular mode of intelligence. If we do speak of God as making up his
mind or changing his mind or deciding or cogitating or reasoning, it can
only be by metaphor as when we speak of his strong right arm or his
all-seeing eye.